Interfaith Relations, JFK, Dante's Inferno,
and Brutal Religiosity in Public Life by Michael
Gillespie
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 28, 2004

E

fforts to encourage a vital,
inclusive, and healthy discussion among the various communities of faith
have never been an especially popular field of endeavor among the clerics of
any religion. That partially explains why, today, much of the truly useful
work in interfaith relations is done at the grassroots level by volunteers,
with only the tacit approval and involvement of religious organizations, and
sometimes despite the interference of organized religion. It is a field in
which success is seldom as noteworthy, newsworthy, or abundant as
the demoralizing evidence of abject failure by the leaders of organized
religion to engage in serious and systematic efforts to promote interfaith
dialog and improve interfaith relations. Among the three Abrahamic faiths,
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, interfaith conversation has long been a
game of odd man out, with most Jewish and Christian clerics viewing
interfaith relations as a more or less exclusive Jewish-Christian dialog.
Much Christian theology and many Christian leaders being thoroughly steeped
in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a truly inclusive conversation among the
representatives of the various religious groups that make up America's
religious tapestry has never really been an option. The very term
"Judeo-Christian" is increasingly seen by many to imply a rejection of
Islam, the third major monotheistic religion, and to imply a rejection of
other religions as well.

The
three years and some months since September 11, 2001 have been especially
difficult for those who labor in behalf of a healthy and inclusive
interfaith conversation. Minnesota author and professor Bill Holm wrote
recently of the "upheaval of sanctimonious and brutal religiosity in public
life." Holm was writing not about radical Islamists but about the American
experience and the excesses of the Christian Right. Much of the offensive
rhetoric Holm alluded to has come from the lips of celebrity Christian
Zionist leaders, including Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson,
and others who enjoy ready access to Big Media news and entertainment
outlets. Frankly, I find it very difficult to credit any Christian cleric's
criticisms of Islam and Islamic leaders today. Surely, there is bigotry in
the Islamic world too, as there is in all religious groups. But it seems
remarkably short-sighted and unhelpful at best for any Christian to harshly
criticize and insult Muslims at a time when the Islamic world is reeling
under the assault of so-called Western values, nominally Judeo-Christian
values, and while three predominantly Muslim countries, Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Palestine, are under attack and occupation by the military forces of
nominally Jewish or nominally Judeo-Christian nations, Israel and the USA
and it's shrinking coalition of the coerced. Not to mention the number of
Arab countries long governed by dictators or monarchies largely dependent
upon and subservient to Washington.

We
American Christians can only imagine how we might react if Arab Muslim
troops invaded and occupied the USA; destroyed large parts of our major
cities; killed uncounted tens of thousands of unarmed non-combatant men,
women, and children and wrote off their deaths as collateral damage; changed
our laws; installed a puppet government; hired out repair and reconstruction
contracts to foreign corporations at wildly exorbitant prices and brought in
thousands of foreign workers and over-paid, trigger-happy mercenaries while
Americans were deprived of opportunities to work, basic services like clean
water and electricity, and other necessities, all in support of an effort by
Arab Muslims to gain control of our valuable resources and please or appease
the leaders of the oppressive, militaristic, and rigidly ultra-nationalist
colonialist government of a neighboring state. At the same time, there can
be very little doubt the world would be a far better and more peaceful place
if we Christians would bear in mind that a) there is good in all religions,
and b) we might better spend our time and energy in efforts to improve own
religion and restrain the activities of a growing assortment of con artists,
doomsday cultists, and other dangerous fanatics and criminals who claim to
act in the name of Christ, rather than criticizing and attacking other
religions about which we generally know precious little and with which we
generally have very little if any useful experience.

As it
is, among sect-divided American Christians, a great many seem to be
perfectly content to allow the religion of Jesus to be falsely
portrayed as a religion about Jesus, a devitalized religion that is
really little more than a shared, glorified quest for the good life, aka the
American Dream. Millions more American Christians stand in grave danger
having been misled by their celebrity leaders into millennialism, also known
as chiliasm, a growing Christian-Zionist doomsday cult that has largely
rejected the core teachings of the historical Jesus of the New Testament in
favor of a dangerous mixture of jingoistic support for preemptive wars of
conquest and an arrogant determination to force the appearance of the
avenging God of the Revelation of St. John the Divine on a schedule of their
own choosing. And millions more of the Christian flock are regularly fleeced
by skilled and experienced confidence men who, fraudulently posing as
Christian clerics, prey upon vulnerable ill-educated, naive, and elderly
believers.

We
Christians could profitably study, benefit from, and assimilate the best of
the truths contained in other religions, and we would do well to admire and
borrow the best in the living spiritual faith of our neighbors, rather than
to denounce the worst in their lingering superstitions, outworn rituals, and
antiquated slogans while ignoring the flaws in Christendom's own collection
of confused and self-contradictory theologies and practices. Brotherhood is
well-nigh impossible on a world whose inhabitants fail to recognize the
folly of unmitigated selfishness, unbridled ethnocentrism, and unrestrained
nationalism. While more exchanges of scholars and national and racial
literature would allow each national and racial group to become more
familiar with others, the trend now seems to be toward fewer such exchanges,
and those that do take place are often significantly impacted by concerns
about security. Ultimately, each race must become familiar with the thoughts
of all races and each nation must know the feelings of all nations, for
ignorance breeds suspicion and fear, which are utterly incompatible with the
essential attitudes of sympathy and brotherly love. Ah yes, brotherly love,
which some few Christians still recall is at the core of the teachings of
the historical Jesus of the New Testament.

A
growing number of Christians, among them former diplomats, retired military
officers, journalists, opinion writers, and activist members of a steadily
growing coalition of progressive political, labor, environmental
organizations are speaking out because, individually or collectively, they
have become convinced that only ethical consciousness can unmask the
immorality of human intolerance and the sinfulness and wastefulness of
fratricidal strife. Many find the aggressive militarism, aggrandizing
arrogance, and other failings of the nominally Christian West, characterized
by the Bush administration's alarming shift to a policy of pre-emptive wars
of conquest based on falsified intelligence findings and political support
manufactured by the chilling jingoism of compliant and complicit media
organizations, far more galling and far more threatening than the perceived
shortcomings of Muslims and Islam, though, admittedly, most are more
familiar with the former than with the latter. In any case, I am one among
that growing chorus of skeptics, and it is not my intention to reform the
Arab or Muslim worlds, but to encourage and challenge my fellow Christians
to approach the cross in truth, in large part because I fear we shall
witness a catastrophic interruption of human progress if modern
Christianity, such as it is, does not rediscover the religion of Jesus, and
soon. It is becoming increasingly clear that until Christianity does
rediscover the philosophy, teachings, and religion of Jesus, all efforts to
disseminate nominally Christian Western values will continue to fall short,
and in many cases those failed efforts will prove distinctly and sometimes
disastrously counterproductive, as they have in much of the Middle East and
Asia, and rightly so, because sub-divided, secularized, and politicized
Christianity, having so completely abandoned its commitment to the
revolutionary teachings of Jesus, stands as an obstacle to the further
advancement of human civilization.

It was
Jesus, after all, who famously and bluntly advised the hypocrites among his
professed followers, that, when they beheld the splinter in their neighbor's
eye, they ought first remove the log interfering with their own vision, or
words to that effect. I mention this apropos of those attitudes and
principles illustrated at great cost by the historical Jesus of the New
Testament, attitudes and principles that many who call themselves Christians
today seem to have rejected out of hand in their zeal to find fault with and
criticize Muslims and Islam, to reorganize the Middle East according to
neoconservative ideology, and to destroy any Arab or Muslim who resists
their efforts. Simply put, there is nothing of Jesus in any such schemes of
material conquest. Moreover, even a cursory study of the New Testament
record of the teachings of Jesus reveals as much, even to non-Christian
readers. Small wonder then that Western criticisms of Islamic extremism so
often fall upon unreceptive ears among audiences all too familiar with
Western Judeo-Christian values and their often destructive application in
Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Many
Arabs are well aware that the first to champion the use of chemical weapons
in the Middle East was that icon of Western democratic values, Winston
Churchill, who described himself as "strongly in favour of using poisoned
gas against uncivilised tribes" in Iraq some seven decades before Saddam
Hussein's regime used gas in Halabja in 1988 during the war with Iran.
Authoritative sources point out that British colonial forces used
Mesopotamia in the 1920s as a laboratory to develop the aerial warfare
tactics they later employed successfully against Germany during WWII. Sir
Arthur "Mad Bomber" Harris, head of wartime Bomber Command, was directly
responsible for the very early morning February 14, 1945, fire-bombing of
Dresden, which resulted in a lethal firestorm that killed tens of thousands
of German civilians. As an RAF Wing Commander in Mesopotamia during the
1920s, Harris had been "happy to emphasise that 'The Arab and Kurd now know
what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes
a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its
inhabitants killed or injured.' It was an easy matter to bomb and
machine-gun the tribespeople, because they had no means of defence or
retaliation. Iraq and Kurdistan were also useful laboratories for new
weapons, devices specifically developed by the Air Ministry for use against
tribal villages. The ministry drew up a list of possible weapons, some of
them the forerunners of napalm and air-to-ground missiles: Phosphorus bombs,
war rockets, metal crowsfeet (to maim livestock), man-killing shrapnel,
liquid fire, delay-action bombs. Many of these weapons were first used in
Kurdistan," according to an excerpt from pages 179-181 of Iraq: From
Sumer to Saddam, by Geoff Simons, London: St. Martins Press, 1994. Thus,
the Pentagon neoconservatives' repeatedly demonstrated willingness and
ability to slaughter innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, and anyone
anywhere else who dares to interfere with their plans for pre-emptive wars
in pursuit of oil reserves, economic and political hegemony, and national
aggrandizement, like Christian-Zionist doomsday cult leaders' enthusiastic
support for such crimes, all thinly veiled as the righteous defense of
nominally Christian values, Western democratic principles, and global market
capitalism, is a development hardly either new or surprising to Arabs and
Muslims. Nor do neoconservative media flacks' reverent comparisons of George
Bush to Winston Churchill serve to allay the legitimate fears and concerns
of Muslims here in the USA or across the Islamic world in the 50-some-odd
countries where most Muslims, who comprise one-fifth of the world's
population, live, worship, and work.

If it is
correct to say that the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad (pbuh) and the
tenets of Islam do not condone terrorist violence, and to call for an end to
such violence on those grounds, is it any less correct to point out that
neither do the teachings of Jesus and the tenets of Christianity support
state terrorism, pre-emptive wars of conquest and national
aggrandizement, or the systematic slaughter of innocent civilians, and to
call on Christians, too, to live up to the nobler ideals of their religion?
And just what is silence in the face of the bloody slaughter of tens of
thousands of innocent non-combatants, if not complicity?

President John F. Kennedy, in Bonn on June 24, 1963, at the signing of the
charter that created a German Peace Corps, remarked, "Dante once said that
the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral
crisis maintain their neutrality." His remark was probably inspired by the
passage from Dante Alighieri’s La Comedia Divina, Inferno, canto 3,
lines 35–42: "This way of wretchedness Belongs to the unhappy souls of those
Who lived without being blamed or applauded. They are now scrambled with
that craven crew Of angels who elected neither rebellion Nor loyalty to God,
but kept apart. Not to mar its beauty, heaven expelled them, Nor will the
depths of hell take them in there, Lest the damned have any glory over
them." Which brings to mind a second quotation from the Inferno, canto 26,
lines 118-119: "Consider your origins, You were not born to live like
brutes, But to pursue virtue and possess knowledge." These verses, the first
a stark warning and the second an admonition and exhortation, can be read as
support for the penetrating vision and mighty will of a Creator who would
restrain self-respect in those who have it, and who will stop at nothing to
restore self-respect to those who have lost it and who really desire to
regain it.

Perhaps
one of the best-kept secrets of our time is that interfaith gatherings are
often positively delightful events. People who are open to or committed to
a truly inclusive interfaith conversation are almost invariably
well-adjusted, open-minded, curious individuals who are not burdened by an
excess of self-respect. They typically respect others, regardless of
cultural differences, and find the stranger's views and the foreigner's
experiences to be interesting and enlightening. People who find their way
to and become actively involved in interfaith organizations, not
surprisingly, tend to be people who work well with others. Unless motivated
by fear that their particular religious group will suffer as a result of
lack of representation, suspicious, fearful, determinedly provincial,
rigidly nationalistic, self-important, haughty, arrogant, or bigoted souls,
again unsurprisingly, tend to avoid interfaith organizations and interfaith
gatherings. Consequently, interfaith gatherings, usually comprised
of like-minded individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds, are generally
interesting, informative, and pleasant if not downright
festive occasions. Building and maintaining a truly inclusive and effective
interfaith organization at the local level can, by all accounts, require a
fair amount of determination and work. But, ask anyone who is actively
involved in efforts to facilitate and promote a more vital and inclusive
interfaith conversation, the work is far more satisfying and rewarding than
most people would ever imagine. Or, you could stay home and watch the tawdry
parade of distractions and disinformation on TV.

Michael Gillespie is a freelance
journalist based in Ames, Iowa, who writes about politics, media, and
interfaith relations. Though he studied the history of political terrorism
at Harvard, he does not market himself as a "terrorism expert." His work
appears frequently in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.